Naomi Klein is in London to give a talk as part of the Victoria & Albert museum’s Brand.New exhibition. Such a show would not be complete without her input, for she is the author of No Logo, the influential book that came out earlier this year, which charts the rise of the brand. More importantly, it also charts the rise of the worldwide anti-capitalist protest movement which has consolidated its diverse grievances around its opposition to the corporations that sell us our lives.
In one small respect, the Groucho Club is the ideal place for Ms Klein to be staying while she’s in town. While it does have a logo, that logo is a discreet irony: a duck, in tribute to Duck Soup, the classic film by the Marx Brothers, who also advised us not to be in any club that would have us as a member.In every other respect though, it’s wrong. It is a rich, affluent company, rakish, superficial and the social powerhouse behind a media which co-opts and marginalises all of Ms Klein’s concerns She is just passing through. I’m a fully paid-up member.Not that these ironies are lost on Ms Klein. Her anti-capitalist book is published by HarperCollins, owned by Rupert Murdoch.

Her television appearances in London are signed exclusively to Channel Four, a company that positioned itself by using logo and lifestyle in just the way Ms Klein criticises. Her high-ceilinged loft in Toronto, which she shares with her high-profile media-star husband, used to be an overcoat factory. In Jakarta, investigating the sweatshops that bring cheap, quality clothing to the West, she discovered that the label being sewn into the coats were none other than London Fog, the very same that used to be made in her apartment. Even the book itself is a matt-black object of covetable loveliness, with Ms Klein’s name itself turned into a logo with the letters N and O picked out in red.Ms Klein is 30 years old, attractive, intelligent, intellectual She’s well-groomed, well-dressed, unthreatening. She is hailed as a spokesperson for the movement she has written about, and it’s a role she takes seriously.

She knows that her success is due to her calm, unhectoring approach, her lack of extremism, and her acceptability to the mainstream. She is a bridge between the unacceptable face of protest and the media’s fascination with it. It is absurd to imagine Ms Klein hurling bricks through the windows of McDonald’s. But while she’s constantly asked to “condemn the violence”, she refuses to do so.”I owe lots of the things I’ve achieved to tokenism,” she says, “I’ve been a token woman, a token young person, a token dissenter. If a publishing company is willing to accept my work because I don’t threaten them, well, all that means is that tokenism can be useful.”Further, Ms Klein is not a subscriber to the idea of tokenism in others – the idea that the way you shop and live your own life can necessarily change the world.

She doesn’t knock it for those who choose it, but says that “maybe too many people are having discussions about whether everyone should wear vegan shoes I don’t live in a squat, or protest on the street either. I think that ethical branding is fine, and that it could become a lucrative niche market itself. But when I visit the export zones abroad who are supplying this stuff, they find the idea of ethical shopping an indulgence, an irrelevance.”Instead, they are where the workers of the West were a century ago, organising unions and trying to raise consciousness in the fight for economic and human rights. It is these people for whom Ms Klein has the greatest sympathy, partly because her own introduction to the protest movement was made at the other end of this continuum. In her early teens Ms Klein’s own rebellion against her left-wing parents (her mother is Bonnie Klein, maker of a seminal feminist film about the pornography industry, and her father is a doctor) involved a full embrace of logo culture and the kind of teenage excess that so many people in the West never let go of.